$16 Million Verdict After a Hospital's Natural Birth Advertising Did Not Match the Restrained Delivery a Mother Actually Received
After trial: No appeal of the verdict was found in public reporting.
Won by Marsh, Rickard & Bryan.
A Jefferson County jury awarded Caroline and J.T. Malatesta $16 million, finding that Brookwood Medical Center committed medical negligence and reckless fraud when the natural-birth experience its advertising promised gave way to a delivery in which Caroline was physically restrained, leaving her with permanent nerve damage.
What happened
Caroline Malatesta had delivered her first three children at St. Vincent's Hospital, each time with standard labor and delivery care. When she became pregnant with her fourth child, she chose Brookwood Medical Center instead, drawn by a marketing campaign the hospital was running across television, magazines, and the internet. The ads promised a mother's choice in how she delivered: individual birthing plans, freedom of movement during labor, even the option of a water birth.
The delivery she got in March 2012 looked nothing like the ads. According to the family's account at trial, nurses restrained her, at times forcibly, and required her to labor flat on her back rather than on her hands and knees as she had requested. A nurse applied pressure to the baby's head to try to delay the delivery. Caroline had no say in any of it. It was, as her lawyers put it, the nurses' way or no way.
Her son was born healthy. Caroline was not. She was later diagnosed with pudendal neuralgia, a nerve injury that causes chronic pelvic pain, described at trial as catastrophic and permanent, and largely invisible to anyone who did not know to look for it. It has affected her ability to work, to be physically active, and to care for her family the way she had before.
The Malatestas sued Brookwood for two things at once: ordinary medical negligence in how the nurses handled the delivery, and fraud, on the theory that the hospital's advertising was not just marketing puffery but a specific factual representation about the choice and autonomy a laboring mother would have, one Brookwood did not deliver on and, the family argued, did not intend to deliver on. That second claim was what made the case unusual. It meant the jury was not just weighing whether the nursing care fell below a medical standard, but whether the hospital had made a promise to prospective patients that it broke by design, treating the promise of a natural birth as a lure rather than a real option.
David Marsh and Rip Andrews of Marsh, Rickard & Bryan represented the Malatestas in Jefferson County Circuit Court. After a two-week trial, the jury deliberated for nine hours before returning its verdict on the evening of August 5, 2016: $10 million in compensatory damages for the injury itself, $5 million in punitive damages tied specifically to the fraud finding, and $1 million to J.T. Malatesta for loss of consortium, for a total of $16 million.
After the verdict, Rip Andrews said the jury had sent a message beyond this one hospital: when a hospital advertises to potential patients, he said, it has to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. A Brookwood vice president said the hospital respectfully disagreed with the verdict.
Sources
This account is drawn from contemporaneous public reporting and the court record.
More proven verdicts from Marsh, Rickard & Bryan
All Marsh, Rickard & Bryan proven verdicts →A Tuscaloosa County jury awarded the family of Johnny Terrell Sledge $30 million after finding that the on-call trauma surgeon at DCH Regional Medical Center started a second elective operation instead of treating a gunshot wound, leaving Sledge to bleed to death in the emergency room over roughly two and a half hours.
A Limestone County jury awarded Gloria Owen $15 million after finding that a HEMSI ambulance crew, including a paramedic with an undisclosed history of drug use who fell asleep instead of monitoring her husband, failed to respond as Robert Owen suffered a heart attack during a routine hospital-to-hospital transfer.
Related medical malpractice verdicts
A Utah judge entered a $951 million default judgment against Steward Health Care after newly trained nurses, an excessive Pitocin drip, and a delayed C-section at Jordan Valley Medical Center left a newborn permanently brain damaged.
A Gainesville jury awarded $900 million, including $700 million in punitive damages, to stroke survivor Joseph Webb over neglect at the University Place Care and Rehabilitation Center, in a Wilkes & McHugh case tried against defaulted Trans Healthcare entities with no defense present, but Florida's First District Court of Appeal reversed the judgment in 2013 because the trial court had refused to let a defense lawyer appear, and the money was never collected; the estate's claim was later resolved for a small share of a multi-estate bankruptcy settlement.
A Clark County jury ordered Health Plan of Nevada and Sierra Health Services to pay $524 million after finding the UnitedHealth Group subsidiaries negligently credentialed a gastroenterologist whose unsafe injection practices at his Las Vegas endoscopy clinics caused the largest medically caused hepatitis C outbreak in American history.
A Kansas City jury awarded ovarian cancer patient Georgia Hayes $225 million in compensatory damages and $2 billion in punitive damages against pharmacist Robert Courtney, who had diluted chemotherapy drugs for profit. The trial judge later reduced the award to roughly $330 million, and Hayes collected almost nothing from Courtney himself, whose assets had been seized by the federal government. Courtney was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison, and drug makers Eli Lilly and Bristol-Myers Squibb later paid $71 million to settle victims' claims.